Charlie Wilen was quite a guy! First-born child of Eastern European immigrants, Charlie fought his way out of the slums of New York City’s turn-of the century Lower East Side, not with his fists, but with good looks, an impudent tongue and as a demon skirt-chaser. “A lion is a dreadful thing among the ladies” reads the caption he chose for his photo in his 1916 dentistry school yearbook. Just what sort of ladies he meant is an open question…Featured in 1923 in the NYC tabloids as the “Dentist Sheik,” the then unmarried Wilen, while serving as the family dentist, cuckolded one of New York’s wealthiest real estate investors and gave his much younger wife a severe case of gonorrhea that required lengthy hospitalization. Charlie was a well-known patron of “The Jungle”, a Greenwich Village club known for its promiscuous bi-sexual male customers. Swapping spit was his evening job, after other oral treatments were completed in the daytime.
By 1925, Charlie had wed a nice Brooklyn Jewish girl with a considerable bank account, but settle down, he did NOT. Shortly after the wedding, Belle Reiser Wilen’s bank account was mysteriously drained, and Charlie took off for Paris with his pregnant wife’s money and didn’t look back. Soon Charlie notched his belt with internationally famous French Tennis star Suzanne Lenglen (think 6 women’s singles Wimbledon championships, virtually seriatim between 1919 and 1926), Isadora Duncan right before her tragic death in 1927, and countless other smart and accomplished broads on his perpetual hunts. He then settled down and married a French woman of noble heritage and went on to a varied career as an inventor, friend of the the Grimaldis in Monaco, and fathered a famous French saxophonist, Barney Wilen
